simple fix for Joomla rss (com_ninjarssyndicator) blank line issue.

Like many we experienced the blank line issue within the Joomla RSS ninja syndicator. The effect of this blank line is that it is not being recognized by rss parsers. To overcome this little issue without needing to hack all the joomla plugin source files in search of this blank line i simply wrote a little PHP script that removes this first line if its there, else it will simply output the rss.

I used this broken company training feed  and fixed it using php. You can view them here.

http://www.amis.nl/index.php?option=com_ninjarsssyndicator&feed_id=7&format=raw

http://technology.amis.nl/blog/xmlfeed.php?id=1

The script to fix it is shown below. Simply alter the urls and paste it inside a php file somewhere on your webserver.

<?php
///////
// Very simple script to clean the blankline from an RSS FEED.
$default = 2; // Default feed id.

if(isset($_GET{'id'})){
   if(is_numeric($_GET{'id'})){
      $index = $_GET{'id'};
   }else{
      $index = $default;
   }
}else{
   $index = $default;
}

$url = 'http://www.domain.ext?option=com_ninjarsssyndicator&feed_id='.$index.'&format=raw';

if($lines = file($url)){
   foreach($lines as $n => $l){
     if(ord($l) != '10'){
       echo "$l";
     }
   }
}
exit;
?>